The Chill of Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

out and tugged it down over her head. Then she retrieved a brush from her bag and stood before the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door.
    He stood behind her, watching her reflection, as she began brushing her short, curly blond hair. ‘You know there’s nothing wrong with what I do,’ he said. ‘It’s an honorable profession. It’s important. And it’s what I care about doing.’
    She turned and stroked his cheek. ‘I know that. I respect it. I don’t want to stop you being who you are any more than I’d want you to stop me being an artist.’
    ‘So there’s gotta be something more.’
    ‘Alright.’ She sighed deeply. ‘Since you seem utterly incapable of letting it go, yes, there is something else. Something that frightens me, and, try as I might, it’s something I can’t seem to get out of my head.’
    ‘And what is it that frightens you?’
    Kyra didn’t answer right away. She stood there looking at his reflection in the glass. Seconds passed. Then a minute. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘just tell me what it is.’
    ‘Alright, if you really must know, Carol Comisky frightens me. In fact, she scares the shit out of me. Do you remember Carol Comisky?’
    Of course he remembered Carol Comisky. She was the widow of a cop who’d been killed the year before. He’d had his throat cut and bled to death trying to stop a killer from attacking a witness. The same guy came within a hair’s breadth of killing McCabe as well.
    ‘Yes. Kevin’s wife. Kevin’s widow. What about her?’
    ‘Remember her standing there at the funeral?’
    She knew McCabe remembered. He remembered everything. All the words he ever heard or read. All the images he’d ever seen. At least all the ones that were important enough for him to notice when he first saw them. He had an eidetic memory. The scene at the cemetery reassembled itself in his mind in extraordinary detail, right down to the last blade of grass. ‘Mostly I see a woman in mourning. No crying. Just sort of a grim, determined look on her face. Black linen suit. Black shoes. Low heels. Dark hair cut short. No hat. Three kids, all under six, standing next to her. Next to them are Kevin’s parents. Standing right behind, Shockley and Fortier, in full dress uniform.’
    ‘Look closer, McCabe,’ she said. ‘Look at her face. Her expression isn’t grim. Or determined. It’s angry. She’s looking right at us. You and me. And she’s pissed. Pissed at Kevin for becoming a cop. Pissed at herself for marrying him. Pissed at you because you’re the one who sent him up to that room and, I suppose, because you’re still alive and he isn’t. She’s pissed at me, maybe me most of all, because I’m not alone and she is. What I see in Carol Comisky is a woman, about my age, standing there with a bunch of little kids next to an empty hole in the ground and seeing any chance she ever had in life going right into that hole along with her dead husband.’
    ‘Her dead husband the cop?’
    ‘That’s right. Her dead husband the cop. And you know what else she’s thinking? She’s thinking if only her husband had been an accountant or a salesman or a tugboat captain – almost anything but a cop – she wouldn’t be burying him, and she wouldn’t be raising those three kids on her own, and all the flowery speeches from Chief Shockley, all the twenty-one-gun salutes, all the bagpipe players marching up and down in their stupid kilts playing “Amazing Grace” won’t make a shit’s bit of difference.’
    ‘She may get married again.’
    ‘Yes, maybe, but the odds are against her. And even if she does, that’s not really my point.’
    ‘Then what is?’
    ‘I understand if we get married the chances are you won’t get killed. Most cops don’t, and, as you point out every chance you get, this is Portland, Maine, and not New York or Baltimore or Detroit. The problem is, McCabe, even assuming you live to a ripe old age, I’ll still have to lie here night after